quotations about culture
One of the most effective ways to learn about oneself is by taking seriously the cultures of others. It forces you to pay attention to those details of life which differentiate them from you.
EDWARD T. HALL
The Silent Language
The acquiring of culture is the developing of an avid hunger for knowledge and beauty.
JESSE LEE BENNETT
On Culture
take a look outside
those lively arts are on the slide
and culture's just a bore
when you're angry, young and poor
THE DAMNED
"Lively Arts"
Culture will give scope, object, and beauty to life, and raise the soul above the petty things that the daily routine of life is apt to bind us to.
JAMES PLATT
Platt's Essays
Capital burns off the nuance in a culture. Foreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money that's electronic and sex that's cyberspaced, untouched money and computer-safe sex, the convergence of consumer desire--not that people want the same things, necessarily, but that they want the same range of choices.
DON DELILLO
Underworld
The state is the nursing mother of human culture.
JOSEPH ALEXANDER LEIGHTON
The Nation and the Ethics of War and Preparedness: An Address
Culture would seem ... first and foremost, to be the knowledge of what makes man something other than an accident of the universe, be it by deepening his harmony with the world, or by the lucid consciousness of his revolt from it.
ANDRÉ MALRAUX
attributed, Malraux : An Essay in Political Criticism
The one thing that seems certain when trying to define culture is that there is no agreement on a single definition of the term.
ABEL ADEKOLA & BRUNO S. SERGI
Global Business Management
The notion of culture is like a window through which one may view human groups. Just as the view changes as one moves from window to window of a building, so the anthropologist's understanding of society changes as he or she moves from one definition of culture to another.
SERENA NANDA & RICHARD L. WARMS
Cultural Anthropology
All testify to the coercion and sacrifice which culture imposes on man. To rely on them and deny the decline is to become even more firmly caught in its fatal coils.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Prisms
Our aim is to stop the life cycle of the enemy culture and replace it with our own.
GEORGE L. JACKSON
Blood in My Eye
The stronger a culture, the less it fears the radical fringe. The more paranoid and precarious a culture, the less tolerance it offers.
JOEL SALATIN
Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal
Consider how culture is conveyed in a multimedia world. Historically grandparents and tribal elders played a central role in recreating, transmitting, and transferring culture. They relied on oral communication along with family, community, or tribal connections. Culture is basically an attitude; it is also learned. It is the learning of shared language and perceptions, which are incorporated in the mind through education, repetition, ritual, history, media, or mimicking. In terms of the media's expanding role, it becomes a shared media culture including influencing perceptions and values. Examples of media systems that attract heavy users are Hollywood movies, MTV, ESPN, soap operas, CNN, the internet, or video games. These systems tend to be the output of global communication giants, such as Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, Sony, and News Corp. Collectively they have the real potential to displace or alter previous cultural values.
THOMAS L. MCPHAIL
Global Communication
You have to taste a culture to understand it.
DEBORAH CATER
attributed, A Queen in the Kitchen
Culture is the way we live. It is the clothes we wear, the foods we eat, the language we speak, the stories we tell, and the ways we celebrate. It is the way we show our imaginations through art, music, and writing.
BOBBIE KALMAN
What Is Culture?
That is the secret of all culture: it does not provide artificial limbs, wax noses or spectacles--that which can provide these things is, rather, only sham education. Culture is liberation, the removal of all the weeds, rubble and vermin that want to attack the tender buds of the plant.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Untimely Meditations
When two cultures collide is the only time when true suffering exists.
HERMANN HESSE
attributed, Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time
Partial culture runs to the ornate; extreme culture to simplicity.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being.
TERENCE MCKENNA
Psychedelic Salon
This last exertion of the intellect, its rising to broad views and great principles, constitutes what is called the philosophical mind, and is especially worthy of culture.
JAMES PLATT
Platt's Essays